The UNITE Group authentication

UNITE believes that the ability to offer more choice and raise the quality of student accommodation services is key to enhancing the student experience.

“Our workforce has to be able to gain up-to-date information from our internal systems” explains Andy Hanson, E-Business Operations Manager for UNITE. “We operate within a fast moving environment; which means information is dynamic and our staff have to able to react quickly to changes. Having timely access to information allows us to play a more effective role in allocating and controlling student accommodation”.

“Simplicity and ease of use are key criteria for our mobile workforce”, says Hanson. With more staff working remotely, UNITE’s existing token solution wasn’t proving cost effective. Admin costs were also high due to synchronisation problems and the deployment of new and replacement tokens.

Any new solution needed to work seamlessly with UNITE’s existing deployment of Cisco VPN and Microsoft Email and Web Browser technology. “SecurEnvoy was the only Two Factor solution that allowed direct integration into our existing Microsoft Active Directory and integration via the RADIUS protocol for Cisco” Andy explains.

“Since we deployed SecurEnvoy, we’ve seen an increase in the efficiency of our mobile workforce. This has been reflected in the reduction of helpdesk calls placed regarding remote access authentication problems.” “Everyone involved in this project has responded positively, remote workers find the SecurEnvoy solution easy to use. Helpdesk and support teams only have to manage user accounts in one repository, our Active Directory domain, which has reduced the administration overhead of our authentication strategy.

After several years using hardware tokens, security was seen as a hurdle that staff had to overcome. We required a fresh approach to managing our remote access environment. SecurEnvoy SecurAccess removed the need for physical tokens, solved problems of deployment and stopped issues with synchronization errors. Costs were also reduced as we leveraged our existing investment in mobile phones.